49 Fun Facts About George Orwell

What was George Orwell's real name?

Eric Arthur Blair is the name on his gravestone, which reads 'Here lies Eric Arthur Blair' with no mention of George Orwell.

In which country was Orwell born?

India: he was born in Motihari in 1903, and his mother took him to England when he was one year old.

Orwell's father was a colonial civil servant in which department?

The Opium Department kept his father abroad, and apart from a brief 1907 visit, Orwell did not see him again for years.

Which future writer did Orwell first meet at St Cyprian's prep school in Eastbourne?

Cyril Connolly beat him to the school's Harrow History Prize, but later, as editor of Horizon, published several of Orwell's essays.

When Orwell first met his childhood sweetheart Jacintha Buddicom, what was he doing?

Standing on his head in a field, he explained, got you noticed far more than being the right way up.

Which famous novelist taught Orwell French at Eton?

Aldous Huxley later wrote to his former pupil about Nineteen Eighty-Four, predicting rulers would prefer infant conditioning to 'clubs and prisons'.

Which hard-working Animal Farm character do the pigs sell to the knacker after he collapses?

Boxer is carted off in a knacker's van, but Squealer tells the other animals that a vet had bought the van and not yet painted over the old name.

Which two Orwell essays draw on his Burma police years?

'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' both come from Burma, and in the second he admits he shot the elephant 'solely to avoid looking a fool'.

Which Nineteen Eighty-Four character risks death or a labour camp by secretly keeping a diary?

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth rewriting old news items, so that every Party prediction appears to have come true.

Which illness did Orwell catch in Burma in 1927, before he resigned to become a writer?

Dengue fever put him on sick leave from Burma, and he never returned to his police post there.

Which American writer's book The People of the Abyss inspired Orwell's tramping expeditions?

Jack London had lived rough in the East End in 1902, sleeping in workhouses and on the streets, and Orwell copied his method.

Which menial job did Orwell take at a fashionable Paris hotel?

Dishwashing in the hotel's cellars, as a lowly plongeur, became the heart of the Paris half of Down and Out in Paris and London.

Which poet, then at Faber & Faber, rejected the manuscript of Down and Out in Paris and London?

T. S. Eliot turned Orwell down again at Faber twelve years later, when he rejected Animal Farm in 1944.

Which revolutionary song does Old Major teach the animals in Animal Farm?

Beasts of England is later abolished by a special decree of Napoleon, and the animals are forbidden to sing it.

Which publisher brought out Orwell's first book, Down and Out in Paris and London?

Victor Gollancz took it after Jonathan Cape and then Faber & Faber had turned it down.

The 'Orwell' in George Orwell was taken from what?

A river in Suffolk, the River Orwell, gave him the surname, which he liked as 'a good round English name'.

Orwell's job at Booklovers' Corner, a Hampstead second-hand bookshop, informed which novel?

He worked afternoons, wrote in the mornings and lodged with the shop's Esperantist owners.

In Wigan in 1936, Orwell lodged in dirty rooms above what?

A tripe shop sat below the squalid lodgings that fill the opening chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier.

The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937 for which subscription scheme?

The Left Book Club edition carried a nervous preface from the publisher, who feared the book's second half would offend members.

Whom did Orwell marry on 9 June 1936?

Eileen O'Shaughnessy met him at his landlady's party in 1935, and in the Spanish Civil War she typed in the ILP office while he fought.

Which American novelist told Orwell over dinner in Paris that fighting in Spain was 'sheer stupidity'?

Henry Miller scoffed at his reasons for going, yet in the 1940 essay 'Inside the Whale' Orwell praised Miller as a rare imaginative talent.

Which militia did Orwell join in the Spanish Civil War?

The POUM took him because he arrived with Independent Labour Party papers, and in June 1937 it was declared illegal and its members hunted.

Where was Orwell hit by a sniper's bullet in Spain in 1937?

In the throat, by a sniper near Huesca, and the wound got him declared medically unfit for further service.

Which invented language in Nineteen Eighty-Four is designed to make rebellious thoughts literally unthinkable?

Newspeak drew on Basic English, the 850-word simplified English that Orwell once championed and later turned against.

Which book came out of Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War?

Homage to Catalonia was a commercial flop in 1938 and found its readers only in the 1950s, after Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Which pig does Napoleon drive off Animal Farm with his dogs?

Snowball is then blamed for everything that goes wrong, even the collapse of the windmill he had designed.

Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air while wintering for his health in which country?

Morocco was a half-year escape from the English winter, secretly paid for by the novelist L. H. Myers.

During the Second World War, Orwell worked for which organisation?

The BBC's Broadcasting House had a Room 101, which is said to have inspired the torture chamber in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Which Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale did Orwell adapt for radio in 1943?

The Emperor's New Clothes aired in November 1943, and in 1945 he subtitled Animal Farm 'A Fairy Story'.

Orwell's regular personal column in Tribune, begun in December 1943, was called what?

As I Please ran while he was Tribune's literary editor, a job he left in early 1945 to report from Europe for The Observer.

Why did Orwell's regular publisher refuse Animal Farm in 1944?

It attacked a wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and Jonathan Cape also backed out after a Ministry of Information official warned him off.

Which given names did the Orwells choose for the baby boy they adopted in 1944?

Richard Horatio was three weeks old when the couple adopted him, and Orwell later took the two-year-old to live on a Scottish island.

What did Orwell salvage from the rubble in a wheelbarrow after a V-1 bomb hit his flat in 1944?

His books went into the wheelbarrow, and he also sifted the rubble for the Animal Farm typescript, which survived undamaged.

How did Orwell's first wife die in March 1945?

An allergic reaction to anaesthetic is the usual account, though the inquest recorded heart failure under ether and chloroform during a hysterectomy.

Which slogan do Animal Farm's sheep bleat?

Four legs good, two legs bad is later changed to 'Four legs good, two legs better!' once the pigs start walking upright.

On which Scottish island did Orwell write Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Jura nearly cost him his life in 1947, when a boating trip into the Gulf of Corryvreckan's whirlpool went badly wrong.

Which Nineteen Eighty-Four ministry houses Room 101?

The Ministry of Love maintains law and order, and in its Room 101 prisoners are made to face their own worst fear until they break.

Which new drug was imported to treat Orwell's tuberculosis in 1948, with a request reaching the Minister of Health?

Streptomycin reached him from the US with David Astor's help, but the drug gave him severe side effects.

In 1949, Orwell gave a list of writers he considered pro-communist to which Foreign Office unit?

The Information Research Department was recruiting writers for anti-communist propaganda, and his list named people he thought should not be trusted with it.

Sonia Brownell is believed to be the model for which Orwell character?

Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the character some friends saw in her, and the couple married by special licence in his hospital room.

In his 1946 essay 'Why I Write', Orwell said his aim was to make political writing into what?

An art, he wrote, adding that every serious line he had written since 1936 was against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.

Where is Orwell buried?

Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire had no link to Orwell, but his friend David Astor arranged the plot to meet his wish for a Church of England burial.

Which modern writer did Orwell say influenced him most, for telling a story 'without frills'?

He listed Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens and Flaubert among the writers he never tired of.

Which essay did The Observer's editor David Astor hand to every new recruit?

'Politics and the English Language' ends its six rules with a get-out: break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell may have coined which geopolitical term in his 1945 essay 'You and the Atom Bomb'?

'Cold war' came to mean the US-Soviet standoff after April 1947, when financier Bernard Baruch used it in a speech.

Which intelligence agency was secretly behind the 1954 animated film of Animal Farm?

The CIA had agents buy the film rights from Orwell's widow, and the film changed the ending so that the other animals overthrow the pigs.

Orwell's 1946 essay describing an imagined ideal British pub is titled what?

'The Moon Under Water' does not exist, Orwell admits at the end, and the nearest real pub he knew had only eight of his ten qualities.

Which Orwell essay, shelved in 1946 as awkward during rationing, was finally published with an apology in 2019?

'British Cookery' came with his recipes, and beside the orange marmalade a handwritten note says 'Bad recipe!'

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Britain is a province called Airstrip One within which superstate?

Oceania switches its enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia, and the Party insists it has always been at war with Eastasia.